Sambalpur: In its bid to make the town clean, the Sambalpur Municipal Corporation has launched a plan to collect e-waste from every household in the town.
Civic body workers will go around in the town and collect e-waste from various households only on Saturdays. At the outset, a team of civic body staff comprising ward officers, Swachha Sathis, Swachh supervisors and sanitary workers move around in various wards and conduct awareness drives among residents. An awareness vehicle is also participating in the drive, Subhankar Mohanty, enforcement officer of Sambalpur Municipal Corporation, said.
Speaking to media persons, Mohanty said sanitary workers will visit the households in the town and collect e-waste comprising electric bulbs, computers and accessories, mobile phones, laptops, television and remote sets, air-coolers, printer machine and fans. He sought the cooperation of residents to make the plan a success.
As a result, people will not dump these e-waste here and there that will help in keeping the town clean. Earlier, people used to mix these e-wastes and dump it along with common wastes for which the sanitary workers were finding it hard to segregate the wastes, he said.
The e-wastes will be collected only Saturdays and taken to material recovery stations (MRF) in the town. There these e-wastes will be handed over to scarp dealers approved by the state pollution control board (SPCB). Earlier, the scarp collector used to collect the e-waste from households, he said.
They keep only those e-wastes which they think necessary for re-use and dump the rest elsewhere. Many of these wastes without getting decomposed were resulting in pollution. At many places these wastes were also leading to silting up the drains. This results in water-logging in the town during rainy season due to obstruction in water flow in the drains, he said.
The sanitary workers were finding it difficult to clean the drains due to this reason. Keeping these problems in mind, the civic body has taken the steps to collect the e-wastes from households, Mohanty added.
Earlier, in its bid to contain pollution and adopt austerity measures the civic body launched battery driven auto rickshaws to collect wastes in the town. Moreover, women have been given the charge to drive the autos as part of a women empowerment drive on the lines of Mission Shakti programme of the state government.
Notably, Bhubaneswar is the first city in the state to launch a drive to collect e-wastes from households in the city.
PNN
